At The Border

Series
Work In Progress
Original Broadcast Date
10/9/1987
Cast
Joe Frank
Format
Absurd Monologue, Sound Effects, 57 minutes
Preceded by:	He Hesitated
Followed by:	Thank You, You're Beautiful
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One evening I walked up to a beautiful woman in a restaurant and said....

At The Border is a program Joe Frank produced as part of the series Work In Progress. It was originally broadcast live on October 9, 1987. Also see At The Border (Remix).

Synopsis

Joe walks up to a beautiful woman in a restaurant, tells her she will fall madly in love with him.

Joe, manic for walking, walks from LA to Vancouver, writes a book about the psychopathology of tramps, mentions the Russian religious sect the Wanderers.

3:50: A Pakistani woman dreamt of walking across the ocean to Karbala, Saudi Arabia, where they made a fortune. Inspired by this dream they set out on ships; most drown.

5:00: 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' - Nietzsche. Joe recalls Bolkonsky's death at the battle of Borodino in War and Peace.

5:45: 'The famous writer once asked... are we any more significant than microbes under a microscope?'

6:10: Last Christmas, Joe's landlady, dreaming that dogs were attacking her, threw her baby daughter against the wall, killing her. She found it droll, began to doubt reality, got her nose trepanned.

7:30: Joe used to go out with a woman whose father had lost his nose as a child to a fungus, had a variety of prostheses. Joe describes her beautiful mother, her dress and manner. The daughter was nondescript so Joe stopped dating her.

9:30: Joe asks if all our past experiences form our present state or if we can be free of them.

10:10: Joe tells the story of Odysseus returning from Troy, hearing an account of his travails, cries for the first time.

11:00: Polish Jews tried to pass themselves as gentiles when the Russians occupied. Eastern European immigrants to the west passed themselves off as nobles.

11:40: 'Snowflakes under a microscope, a desert caravan with camels on a horizon, rain on a railroad coach window, pebbles in a mountain stream, moonlight over the jungle, old photographs, summer lightning, cool white sheets of crater on the horizon.'

13:40: Joe gives an imagined description of the invention and use of umbrellas.

16:30: Joe describes a construction site on an old potters' field. Apparently Joe is the architect, sees that the house will not match his plans.

17:30: Joe tells a story from Czesław Miłosz about a Soviet soldier killing a German POW for his sheepskin coat. This story is nearly the same as the original, which is in The Parallax View.

19:20: Kierkegaard on despair, apparently an accurate reference.

20:00: Joe talks about the movie The invisible man, observes that he had to put clothes and bandages on to be seen, asks what we expect people to see in us.

20:50: Joe says that wild animals are comfortable with themselves, aren't self-conscious.

22:10: Joe asks what we think about TV talk shows that see both sides of every issue.

22:40: Joe tells about going to sort-of-church last Sunday.

23:30: Joe tells of a Russian sect that worshipped holes, drills a hole to worship.

25:10: 'Oh, wondrous void, eternal nothingness. I offer myself so that you might cast your inscrutable dear silence upon me. Oh lustrous hole, symbol of the greater glory of absence, darkness, and mystery beyond the realm of human thought. Let me ask for your grace and forgiveness in the knowledge that I shall serve you all the days of my meaningless life.'

27:00: 'I was either a businessman in New York, or I had killed a businessman in New York. Two detectives came to arrest me. I asked them to wait one more day, but they handcuffed me and put me in the back of their car. Then, driving down Wall Street, they offered to let me go if I'd meet them at 10:30 tomorrow morning at the Stock Exchange and give myself up. If the Stock Exchange was closed due to a holiday, we'd meet in front of the building. I agreed.'

27:40: 'Last winter, I was determined to get sick. I walked around my house with the windows open, exposing myself to drafts, bathed my feet in cold water, and visited friends who had viral infections. But nothing happened - I was immune. Then, when I was about to take a positive, decisive step in my life, I came down with bronchitis.'

28:20: 'I'm deeply moved whenever I see a woman weeping...' Joe feels most desire for crying women, prays.

30:10: 'The Bible says, in the beginning was the word. But which word?...'

30:40: Joe used to be a psychoanalyst, was annoyed by a patient who arrived late.

31:50: Joe can't sleep in a room where there's a dead body.

32:20: Joe feels slighted when people cut in front of him.

33:50: Joe describes the violent bathhouse across the street.

35:50: Joe describes suffering from compulsive memories.

36:40: 'Now here's a paradox: Sartre spent years writing in a café about alienated people and the breakdown in communication. And in doing so, he became the least alienated person in France. Everyone knew him, everyone respected him. He had millions of readers. He was a celebrity.'

37:10: 'Another paradox: The tiniest thing has become the most powerful: The atom: Split it, and you destroy the world. Yes, when I think of human ingenuity, why the arteries in my neck swell with pride.'

38:40: Joe talks about the ambiguities of life, how facts become obsolete, that complete understanding is impossible.

43:00: Joe describes a surreal trip on a horizontal elevator, calling his father for help; he smokes a pack of Chesterfields in the phone booth all at once.

46:10: 'Oh, wondrous void, eternal nothingness, I offer myself so that you might cast your inscrutable dear silence upon me. Oh lustrous hole, symbol of the greater glory of absence, darkness, and mystery, beyond the realm of human thought - let me ask for your grace and your forgiveness.'

46:50: Joe describes early restaurants, before waiters, their evolution.

50:10: Joe describes catering a fancy wedding. The doves that were supposed to fly out of the top layer of the cake were all dead, casting a pall on on the marriage.

53:40: Joe tells of his farmer father, who lost it to debt. They moved to the city where he took a job at a screw factory, got caught in the threader, was threaded to death.

55:00: Joe took his place, was attracted to the woman who worked next to him. They walked a mountain path to a cliff, looked out over the empty quarter.

Legacy Synopsis

Joe meets a woman at a party, tells her she will become obsessed with him. The compulsion to wander. The psychopathology of the tramp. A religious sect known as the wanderers. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. War and peace. A woman kills her child, begins to doubt the reality of things. Dating a woman whose father has a prosthetic nose and whose mother is enchanting. Can you cut off yourself from your past? Odysseus cries as his story is read to him. People who change their identities to fit the times. A list of memories:

• Snowflakes under a microscope
• A desert caravan with camels on the horizon
• Rain on a railroad coach window
• Pebbles in a mountain stream
• Moonlight over the jungle
• Old photographs
• Summer lightning
• Cool, white sheets
• A freighter on the horizon
• People with umbrellas.

More about umbrellas. An architect inspects his work. Via Czesław Miłosz, the tale of a German prisoner of war who is comforted, but then killed for his coat. Kierkegaard - despair that does not know it is despair compared with living in Glendale. The invisible man and what people see when they look at you. The lives of animals. Hole worshipers. Uncertainty and human knowledge. Naming things so as not to fear them. Being lost on an elevator, getting off at 39th street in the wrong city. Joe addresses cheering crowds. Discordant monologue against cello music: Joe's father is a famous physician who sues his patients. Joe hunts his father's killer. A church in honor of evolution. Honking at an apartment building. Meeting a ghost in a cemetery while dressed as a nun wearing an alarm clock. A rich man thought dead awakens, loses his memory and joins a religious sect. Joe is a king whose power is linked to the phases of the moon. A roman army attacks the sea. A factory owner who only discusses aesthetics. Scenes from the bible portrayed by actors dressed as concentration camp victims. Our reason for existence is to nurse parasites. "What the world needs now," sung in a exaggerated Indian accent. A human being is a pile of secrets. A jealous husband discovers that his wife has given birth. A child's sense of time. A Dutchman who sees people's skeletons. All the things my right hand does for me. The earth was created all at once. Traveling and finding that all towns are the same. Scenes from a car. Discovering the ruins of Los Angeles. Discovering the meaning of existence and forgetting it. Yelling at drivers with road noise in the background. Joe's father was killed at the screw works.

Music

This is an incomplete record of the music in this program. If you can add more information, please do.

• "Kakashi (かかし Scarecrow)" - Aragon (from Aragon, 1985) | YouTube [Intro]
• "Otherwise" - Adam Rudolph (from Eternal Wind, 1984) | YouTube [26:04]

Shared material

• At The Border (Remix)
• The "compulsion to wander" and "psychopathology of the tramp" segments (and possibly others from this program) are re-used later in Philosophy.

Additional credits

The original broadcast credits state: "Technical production by Tom Strother."

Commentary

The legacy synopsis is of At The Border (Remix) - an excusable mistake because many stations misidentified.